Pixiq

With three new compact camera releases scheduled for September, and the EX1 hitting the shops a few weeks back, Samsung have enjoyed a busy summer. (I wonder if four camera releases competes with moving house for busy-ness?) Ranging from £129.99 to £199.99, each addition to Samsung’s compact camera range has some whizz-bang techie feature that they’re being all keen beans about.

I thought we’d look at the cheapest one first: the PL90, at £129.99. It has Samsung’s ‘Smart Auto’ feature, which adjusts the camera’s mode according to conditions to give the best possible picture and the ‘Smart Album’ gizmo that helps you organise your images. 12 mega-pixels, 4x optical zoom, a 2.7″ LCD screen, and movie mode. Nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary, thinks me, but Samsung are rather pleased with the integrated USB connector, so you can hook it up to a computer wherever you are to look at and share pictures, as well as charge the battery. So that’s quite neat.

Samsung PL200 - also available in silver and red

The PL200 will come in at the top of PL range. Costing £149.99, it has a 7x optical zoom, 14 mega-pixels, a 3″ LCD screen, optical and digital image stabilisation, and you can shoot high-definition video on it. It also has beauty shot and smile and blink detection modes; these features allow you to brighten and smooth out skin tones in-camera, detects when people are smiling before taking a picture, and senses if people are blinking, so takes three photos in succession. At the price, it is offering pretty much everything that someone might want from a point-and-shoot to get good looking pictures.

Finally, there’s the WiFi-enabled ST80, costing £199.99. For Samsung the killer feature is clearly its WiFi capability, meaning that photos can be emailed or uploaded to your photo-sharing website of choice almost wherever you are. (I say ‘almost’ because it’s probably not quite so useful when you’ve just photographed woodcocks in a field in Suffolk.) However, it enjoys some other nifty features, too. It has ‘Smart Auto’, just as the others do, but also ‘Smart Crop’, which offers in-camera editing. Then there’re its 3x optical zoom, 3″ LCD touch-screen, 14 mega-pixels, high-definition video recordings, and availability in four colours: charcoal black, white, fuchsia pink, and mint blue. (Any ideas on mint blue, folks? I thought it was mint green or ice blue.) Overall it sounds as if it’s a pretty camera for taking pretty pictures.

Want to know more? Doubtless Samsung can help you out.